Rubo, thanks for the pm,
I love where your head’s at!
At the USAMC, when someone stood to discuss their digit method, before addressing his method, he indicated me and said “First, I have to say that I’ve been coming here for years, and this guy has come up with the first, really new cool speed-numbers idea [(00-99adj)+(00-99noun)] I’ve seen here in the [American] events.” Before the competition, during probably my first month of learning about memory techniques, I sent a PM to Mr. Pridmore basically saying “why on earth would you or anyone else create a 3-digit image system when I use 4-digits per image, and built the system in practically no time at all?”
His answer was threefold: “First, with your ‘wooden tophat’ example,” he said, “I would say that really is two images, not one.”.
Now, that is obvious, but at the time, the subtlety of this point was lost on me.
“Second, it might be a problem in long-events if you have many different “wooden” objects, or the like.”
He may still be right about this one, and it’s a concern. I have never had to do an endurance event, but it reminds me of Boris building an entire Ben System JUST to avoid using his 52-image card system in endurance events, even though there are few in the world who can memorize a single deck as fast as he.
“Thirdly, I don’t even think I could come up with 100 distinct enough adjectives.”
This remark coming from him totally blindsided me at the time. It wasn’t hard for me, so how could it be hard for him? Now I have a bit of a better idea about how he could have said that truthfully. Hopefully I don’t presume too much when I say that it may have been so long since Ben actually memorized using a system with 100 items or less, since he has Ben for cards, digits, and binary, that he was imagining trying to come up with 100 adjectives that would work WITH every object in a 3-digit system. Now that I have a 3-digit system of my own, I can assure you that using the same 100 adjectives to describe the 1000 total objects that I used to use to describe the inital 100 is no time-saver. It’s hard. In the time it takes just to customize an image based on the 2-digit adjective preceding it (before even ‘memorizing’ it), a shiny, new 3-digit image could have been placed down just fine. 3-digit object systems don’t seem to be amenable to adjective customization, perhaps because the objects must be so customized already to be differentiated from the many other objects on the list. And yet, I STILL spent quite some time with these 1000 objects making each into a potential ‘adjective’ of its own. 777, a slot machine, for instances, if preceding any other object, would make an image of that second object getting its “lever” pulled, and then a bunch of gold comes out. So 777345 “slotcow” would work nicely - pull the cows tail and coins spill out of her mouth. But do you know what always happens sooner or later? A really incompatible object pair comes along, and not only is there nothing to pull, there’s nowhere for you to put a handle, nor is there any way for gold to come out. Until you examine all 100,000 combinations individually, or have a really slick categorization system (!), you will never be safe. 1000 “extra,” or “unrelated” adjectives is simply out of the question. Even if you did it, it wouldn’t be worth the time. Now I’m in this weird position about whether I want to stick with 4 digit adj+object (now called (by me) “DO” for “descriptor + object”) and ignore 900 newly created images, or just ditch that and use O+O+O, for 9 digits per loci, or something of the like. But what you should take from this post is that that really is the choice that it will probably come to. Descriptors are cool, but their usefulness might stop at speed-numbers.
